Report on the 8th International Workshop on Business Intelligence for the Real-Time Enterprise (BIRTE'14)
Malu Castellanos, Umeshwar Dayal, Nesime Tatbul, Damianos Chatziantoniou, Qiming Chen
2015
SIGMOD record
Like in previous years, the workshop was well attended by an engaged audience from both academia and industry, breaking an attendance record in the history of the BIRTE workshop series with more than 80 participants during the keynote session. In addition to the keynote speech, the workshop included two invited industrial talks, and four presentations of peer-reviewed papers covering a wide range of real-time BI topics with an overarching emphasis on big data analytics. The workshop developed
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... follows: After the o cial opening of the workshop, two papers were presented -one on BI analytics on graph-structured data and another on contextual analysis in temporal databases. The invited industrial talks session that followed included a talk from Microsoft Research about their data processing solutions for complex big data analytics and a talk from HP Labs about a new fault tolerance technique that they developed for distributed stream processing. The afternoon sessions opened with the highlight of the workshop: Dr. C. Mohan's keynote speech providing a critical survey of the current big data landscape. The workshop closed with a session that consisted of the two remaining papers -one on exploratory OLAP over linked data and another on data stream partitioning. KEYNOTE SPEECH This year's keynote speaker was Dr. C. Mohan from the IBM Almaden Research Center. Dr. Mohan has been a well-known pioneer in database sys-⇤ This author served as a session chair at the workshop. tems and has made numerous contributions to relational database research and technology in various di↵erent roles at IBM for more than 30 years. In his talk "Big Data: Hype and Reality", Mohan delighted the audience with a concrete and detailed picture of the current landscape of big data systems. According to Mohan, as users and developers gain a deeper understanding of the needs of real use cases (including real-time BI applications), the initial hype around big data systems (including NoSQL, NewSQL, and others) has been fading away. It is now becoming clearer that most of the so-called distinctive features of big data systems have in fact been well-known principles of relational database systems for decades. Mohan's comprehensive and critical survey of this popular field attracted much attention from a big audience and was very well received. INDUSTRIAL TALKS Inviting industrial speakers to present their perspective on real-world BI problems, solutions, and applications has been a tradition of BIRTE since its inception in 2006. This year's workshop featured two industrial talks. First, in his talk entitled "Building Analytics Engines for the Big Data Age", Dr. Badrish Chandramouli of Microsoft Research presented the challenges of a temporal streaming engine called Trill. Trill has been architected as a library to support embedded execution within cloud applications and distributed fabrics. Second, Dr. Qiming Chen of HP Labs gave a talk about "Optimistic Failure Recovery in Distributed Stream Processing". More specifically, he presented the backtrack-based and the window-oriented recovery mechanisms implemented as part of the Fontainebleau distributed stream analytics system built on top of 62
doi:10.1145/2854006.2854019
fatcat:sxwbkrrwizacljluuejsmgvqpa